I think I have finally found a pleasant HD video editor and perhaps I'd better share it with you guys. I shoot my home videos on a Canon HV20 and what comes out of the camera is beautiful, though when the light is low, eg indoors, you get better quality with cheaper SD cameras. Anyway I would highly recommend the Canon HD offerings.
Editing: my previous experiences with a packaged Sony editor were painful. Frequent crashes and interminably slow to move clips, enter transitions, etc. Rendering was an overnight job. With my foray into HD I also got myself a new PC with a quad processor, 4GB ram, dual hard drives, fast video display card, etc. No excuses. But I was till apprehensive with rendering HD edited versions. I have been trying out Sony Vegas Platinum. It actually works, provided you do not try rendering to wmv or any compression beyond mpeg2. My first trial to wmv at 1080 took 6x as long to render as the length of the video! Half hour video takes 3 hours! And I ended up with a slight yellowish cast and also the black point shifted to grey. Noticeable loss in quality. But when I tried to render using mpeg2 to m2t the rendering did not take much longer than the video itself. Fantastic! I also downrezzed the video to SD for putting on a normal DVD for a friend and it does not take much longer to render than the length of the video either. Quality of the m2t at 1080 looks close, if not identical, to the original, and the SD DVD is also very good. To run Vegas Platinum at HD 1080 you also need to download the latest version of WMP (Windows Media Player ver 11). Then everything works great. Only problem is the huge 1080 m2t files. Currently I can store them on a hard drive to watch on a PC or on a DV tape to replay through the Canon HV20 camera. Thought I'd share a pleasant experience for a change.